


313

by levendis



Series: Gloryland [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: American History, Angst, Conspiracy Theories, Depression, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Period-Typical Racism, Survivor Guilt, Time Travel, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 04:46:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3923446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Ninth Doctor and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, over and over again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	313

  
**New York City, September 27, 1953**  
  
There's a boy leaving school. He's alone, slipping out a back door, rucksack slung over his shoulder. He's heading to a newsstand. Dime novels, pulp magazines, _Amazing Stories_ and _Flying Aces_ , a thousand worlds better than this one. There are pigeons flying from his path. The sun is high and bright in the sky, the Earth revolves below them, faster than anything imaginable.  
  
The Doctor has seen this before. Different angles, the boy walking through the Bronx, away from everyone. The birds, the sun, cars passing. This time he steps from the TARDIS, takes a shortcut, reaches the newsstand first. He picks a magazine from the rack, something with a rocket on the cover, suited astronaut, the moon, a beautiful woman. He fishes coins from his jacket pocket to pay, and waits for the boy.  
  
His mother named him Lee, after his father who died before he was born. Lee, skinny and unremarkable, dreaming of being someone else, walking up the cracked sidewalk. He'll be dead in ten years, gunned down on live television. He doesn't know. No one does, not yet.  
  
Except the Doctor, who should not be here. But then again, who's left to tell him that? The only rules now are the ones he makes himself. So he stands by the newsstand, shielding his eyes against the sun, staring at Lee as he approaches.  
  
"Hey," he says. It's the first word out of his mouth in a long, long time. "Yeah, talkin' to you. You like stories, right?" He's got a Northern accent this go-around, apparently. He wonders what else has changed.  
  
"It's my good deed of the day," he says, and gives him the magazine. Lee looks at him suspiciously, says nothing. Tugs the rucksack closer to his body, then turns and runs.  
  
  
  
  
  
**Minsk, June 16, 1961**  
  
This is his ship landing on alien ground. This is the man he is becoming. His molecules still shifting, energy drifting from his palms, his eyes, his throat, unmaking and remaking him.  
  
He runs a mile, maybe more, past crumbling apartment buildings and grocery stores. It's important to know how well he can run. How fast this body goes. It's important he knows the way his muscles jolt when he stops on a dime, how he takes corners, the amount of information he can take in while moving. Lung capacity, average speed, his boots hitting the pavement. Imagine the devil at your back.  
  
  
There's a young man leaving his apartment. He's alone, slipping through the cracks of this country, dreaming of fame. A personal revolution in a fragile human heart. This is the USSR and Lee is building his future. The Doctor runs.  
  
He avoids his reflection. His face is a mystery to him still; this is how it should be. He knows height, he knows speed, he knows vision and sound, scarred hands, boots hitting the pavement. No more. He is a mechanism, a tool, faceless and nameless.  
  
Not so nameless anymore, of course. It's getting easier to remember that. He's the Doctor; who else would he be? He's the Doctor, and he's running again. But then, he's never really stopped.  
  
  
  
  
  
**Irving, November 24, 1964**  
  
The Warren Commission Report is light blue, clothbound, 888 pages and 43 ounces. He tests the weight of it in his hands, the texture of the paper, solid and inert. The weight of history in his hands. He reads it once, then again, then rests it on the console, watches the light of the rotor flicker over it. How humans make sense of things, calm and measured, these facts, lies, half-truths, redactions. Twenty-six supporting volumes piled by the coat rack. These numbers: 552 witnesses heard by the commission, 25,000 interviews and 2,300 reports from the FBI, 1,550 interviews and 800 reports from the Secret Service. Death, quantifiable. How humans re-write the past.  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 22, 1963**  
  
This is the crowd. They pulse united, they pulse common cause, they pulse something greater than them. All these people. Young, old, rich, poor, average. Businessmen in staid suits and women dressed like Jackie, children hanging from their parents' hands, teenagers pretending boredom. All of them waiting for the same thing, all waiting for the world to shift around them. All of them waiting to play their part.  
  
He knows history is not just what's written in textbooks. History is things too small to be noticed, details localized. Confetti on the ground and flags in windows. The wife there without her husband, the policeman waiting impatiently for his lunch break. History is the baby wailing away unconscious of the occasion. But this, now, this is bigger. The thing in the air holding them together, this crowd, they all own a piece of this. They all will hold a piece of this history inside them. Later, oh, the stories they'll tell, and everyone will listen. I was there, they'll say. I was there when the president was shot.

  
  
  
**Boston, July 8, 1981**  
  
He modulates his voice, flattens his accent, says he's from Canada. They hear what they want to hear. He disappears into this century, these cities. Slipping through the cracks of the country. He wonders if this is what he was made to be. He wonders what he's supposed to be doing, now that he's not a soldier anymore.  
  
There is all the time in the world. He pauses, indulges, sidesteps to a leafy green college campus. He buys a hot dog. He watches Peri Brown cross through hissing sprinklers, pink dress against the wet grass, she's laughing. She doesn't notice him. He does not go up to her, he does not warn her about strange men in blue boxes. All the things that he's done.  
  
"Americans," he comments to the hot dog vendor. "Always rushing in without thinking of the consequences."  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 7, 1963**  
  
He crosses his own timeline. He wonders what happens now that Gallifrey is lost. Violating the laws of time, but who's enforcing them? He doubles up, triples up, he's everywhere.  
  
He applies for a job in a camera shop. He stays for one day of training, during which he sells a medium quantity of 8 mm film to Abraham Zapruder, an amateur enthusiast. Facts and numbers: Zapruder's hand-held records images at a rate of 18.3 frames per second. Each frame will be taken individually, labeled and cataloged, examined inch by inch, the motorcade slowed to a crawl. Frame 313, the president is dead.  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 24, 1963**  
  
Oswald is being transferred from police custody to the County Jail. 11:10 AM, he flashes the psychic paper at the door of the Dallas city jail and forces his way through the crowd of policemen, down to the basement. He lights a match for one of them, but does not speak. He waits. At 11:20, Jack Ruby pulls a gun from his jacket pocket and shoots Oswald in the stomach. He hears the shot, the split-second of calm, then the rush of officers, onlookers, Oswald collapsing. The television crew capturing everything.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 20, 1963**  
  
On the high street, the Doctor buys a television set. He takes it from the shop, balanced under his arm, over Dealy Plaza to where the TARDIS is parked by the underpass. He wires the set to the console, runs the cable through to a dozen different filters and detectors. It sits on the floor, vibrating against the grate, tuned to static.

 

  
**Dallas, November 24, 1963**  
  
Oswald is being transferred from police custody to the County Jail. 11:10 AM, the Doctor turns on the TV and watches. Oswald is being led outside. The policemen crush against him, towards the news reporters. Jack Ruby, his back turned to the camera, the muzzle flash, Oswald collapsing. He does not look for himself in the crowd. The station replays the moment, over and over: the shot, Oswald's face creasing in agony, the blank looks on the guards.  
  
Show and audience/the screen/second-hand death/the guards/history re-written. He's done this before. He remembers Peri, loudmouthed American Perpugilliam Brown, barely born, already dead. Somewhere somewhen he is watching himself betray her, he is watching himself pulled apart, he is watching her die. Time slip, head slip, it's just post-regeneration confusion, there's always the risk.  
  
  
Objectively: He is mourning the wrong person. Subjectively: His stomach knots, hearts mis-beat, he falls out of sync. Ruby shoots, Oswald collapses; the Doctor leaves, Peri dies. Cause and effect.  
  
He falls out of sync. He watches detached: this is a document, this is real life becoming a movie. He watches until the test screen comes on.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 22, 1963**  
  
He remembers the rifle in his hands. Hiding in the shadows of the Panopticon, assembling the rifle, taking aim. The weight of it, crosshairs aligning, the slightest pressure on the trigger. The wrong man falling, half a universe away.  
  
He stands on the roof of the County Records building and watches Oswald in the window.  
  
  
(More numbers: the C2766 Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, 6.5 X-4s scope, control number VC836, paid for with U.S. postal money order No. 2,202,130,462 in the sum of $21.45 ($19.95 for the gun, $1.50 for shipping), and delivered to A. Hidell, P.O. Box 2915, Dallas Texas, on March 20, 1963. Hidden in a garage in Irving, Texas, wrapped in a green and brown blanket. History echoing around the facts it's reduced to. The smallest details.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 22, 1963**  
  
He doubles up, he triples up, he's everywhere. The justification being that this is a hard moment to budge, this is an established point, and history will out. He covers the city. No one will notice, no one will put it together: they never do. And besides, everyone's here to watch the motorcade.  
  
Shots are fired: he allows himself to apprehended by a policeman (cowboy hat, heeled boots, white sheets on the weekends), then slips away before he can ask his name. He will become 'the man in black leather' in the report, nothing more than a rumor. This is the mythology into which he disappears.  
  
There's a thrill, something he's never admitted to, a thrill in imprinting himself on a planet's timeline. Starting fires, starting cults, writing himself in. There's a shock, a twist of perverse pleasure in seeing images of himself, his ship, in the ancient revered things of a culture. Stained glass windows and fuzzy eight millimeter. He becomes more than himself. The Doctor, the legend, the unlimited man, and isn't that so much better than real life?

  
  
**Dallas, June 9, 1997**  
  
He collects photographs. Robert H. Jackson's photo of Ruby shooting Oswald. Oswald posing with a gun and two opposing Communist leaflets. Marguerite in her stern horn-rimmed glasses. An aerial view of Dallas. An investigator's reenactment of Oswald by the window. The commission arranged around an office table, ashtrays and papers scattered. Autopsy photos, clinical and unflinching. A nation spread bare on a metal table.  
  
(His people are cremated. A Time Lord dies and his brain patterns, his thoughts and plans and loves, the electric pulse of his personality, is saved to a file and his body is burned. His body is burned and not observed, none of this ceremony, this public mourning. Death is a filing procedure, a putting away.)  
  
(His people _were_ cremated. Past tense now, remember that.)  
  
  
20th century Earth technology: the way images dissolve into abstraction, Ben Day dots and printer's errors, the blur of movement, the harsh egalitarianism of black and white. The way things disappear. The only truths are in mathematics: photographs paraphrase, of course, like history, like him. An approximation of this event.  
  
He pulls the film apart. He goes frame by frame. He uses digital enhancement, he feeds the film through one of the TARDIS' computers, the big one in a dusty back room that specializes in this sort of thing. The reels click and whirr and the computer flashes lights. Big square buttons. The film plays against a blank wall, dust motes floating in the light. He watches frame by frame. The elements separate: the cars, the faces, the trees lining the street. Motion blur and color splotches. Frame 313, the president is dead. He does not look for himself in the crowd.  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 22, 1963**  
  
Something about this country never sat right with him. England he understands, the ritual and history, tiny and damp and resolute. England which he stumbled upon and then got stuck in and never got out of his system. America doesn't know what to do with itself, he thinks. It sprawls and strains. Highways, fast food, fast cars, man on the moon, pioneers, immigrants, rock and roll. America tears down its past as quick as it can. America is a desert mirage. America is a time bomb.  
  
He stands on the corner of Elm and Houston and watches the heart of this country's dream of itself detonate. This vast stretch of land, these lives in miniature. It means nothing. It means everything.  
  
"I had a lover once who was older than you," he says. "She was barely out of school. Now look at you. Not even two hundred yet and you're already falling apart."  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 24, 1963**  
  
A possible future: the nuclear weapons in Cuba are discovered. Trails followed, caves found, a coup completed. Russia retaliates. America disappears - five days later, a small group of Sontarans arrive near what used to be Wall Street. Ten days later, the Earth becomes the center of the end of the universe.  
  
Another possible future: Four ships hover above Tampa. They infiltrate exiles, they ship weapons, they secure ports. They're waiting for Castro to die. The palace coup is pulled off: in the chaos, two ships land in Tampa, two in Havana. Events progress.  
  
He thinks of it as securing his moral high ground. He is justified in what he does, one way or another.  
  
He volunteers information. Some of it is true. He says _John Smith_ and slides the psychic paper over the table, he doesn't read what it says. He volunteers services, he colludes. He references UNIT, he pulls up files, he namedrops. He lets it slip that certain parties from certain planets have certain vested interests in Cuba. They call him AMCHRON. The documents detailing his involvement will be declassified in 2017, although most will be destroyed just prior to their release. Four UNIT agents will be retconned, one will be killed in a motor accident, one will run for Prime Minister and lose by a considerable margin, then disappear into obscurity. He wonders if Barusa would be proud of him.

 

  
  
  
**Dallas, June 9, 1997**  
  
This is a thing, the library, this is a concept echoed through the galaxy. A place where knowledge congregates. He enjoys the idea of a library. A library is a focal point, a physical embodiment of information. You go to a library, what happens is you make up your mind and you leave your house and walk or drive or take a bus and then you walk through the doors, it's something you need to decide to do. He could be in the TARDIS and all this at his fingertips. Instead, he avoids his reflection in the grey Formica tabletop, reading page by page.  
  
This is already an anachronism. The internet has been invented and it will spiral and tumble and dig itself into the way this planet remembers, the way history is recounted, but for now he is here, in the municipal library. Hot and carpet-muffled quiet and the sluggishness of summer. A heat that could eat you alive. They line the books up in a way that makes sense to them and he works it in his head until it makes sense to him, stacks and rows and corridors. He pulls books on everything tangential. The history of Dallas, Russian politics, how to count cards. Another copy of the Report, this one dogeared, battered, heavy with dust and mildew, a thousand different fingerprints. Information with weight and volume and smell.  
  
He's seen a fair amount of techniques for getting new things into your head, some involving minor surgery, some involving things close to magic. In himself he has a lurking dangerous telepathy that he began ignoring the day he joined the war, this is a fact he admits to himself. All the clever ways to learn, and he thinks he likes this one the best. It's old-fashioned and it smells and it's difficult, and the dryboned crumpled-up woman by the desk is giving him strange looks, and it breaks somehow in translation but there's something in the bluntness of it. Something in its failures. The sublime drifting between the lines. Tongue paused behind words he can't remember.  
  
He takes notes, by hand, a thing that had never seemed natural even when he'd desperately wanted it to, not even in school when he bore archaic ink stains with pride. He takes notes by hand, the way he taught himself to. The linear flatline of this country's language, the limited alphabet, to the right and then down and to the right and then down and repeat. He takes notes in the sweep and curve of High Gallifreyan, he turns twenty-four letters into something he can believe in, a sort of alchemy. And how could they ever live with this language, he wonders, as his hand scrawls black Bic over paper, the turn and return: how do they make do with this? Things going only forward and down.  
  
  
  
  
  
**Dallas, November 23, 1963**  
  
The local constabulary. Earth isn't the only planet to have non-military defense units. Even Gallifrey had guards. Crime is a constant. He thinks: money, power, drugs, control. The decadent society, repeated across the universe. Decaying worlds. He was a criminal, once.  
  
The building is jammed with them. Cops in cowboy hats, cowboy boots, cowboy bolo ties. Cops spitting tobacco. Cops with coffee extra sweet, fried eggs and bacon, the smell rising. Cops grabbing secretaries. Dirty cops, compromised cops, Klan kops, white sheets on the weekends.  
  
"Mr. Smith?" Uniformed DPD, wet behind the ears. Kid looks like a puppy. Kid's going to shoot his first live bullet in 14 days, into an unarmed black janitor in an alleyway, crippling him for life.  
  
He forces down the bile in his throat, forces up a smile. "Lead on, Castellan." The kid shoots him a look. "Local slang, up in...Canada. It's a compliment."  
  
Kid's going to die in five years. He follows him down the hall.  
  
  
  
Room one, the lobby room, guards by the door and cigarette smoke thick inside. Three FBI blacksuits, one UNIT agent braying South London, they're talking around the question of Cuba. Glass walls, room two, Oswald behind a desk, looking blank.  
  
"So this is the main attraction, nice," he says. "John Smith, I'm expected, I have a number." UNIT writes down his code, phones it into HQ.  
  
The reluctant go-ahead, the dismissive wave. He closes the door behind him and thumbs the surveillance disruptor setting on the screwdriver. They'll hear what they want to hear. He works out a kink in his neck. Lee looks past him.  
  
"You stick around, Lee. All throughout history, they'll remember your name. Always. They'll forget Marcello, they'll forget Bannister, they'll lose interest. But Lee Harvey Oswald will always be the man who shot the president. A thousand years from now, they'll know your name."  
  
Lee is silent. Pulls sullenly at his handcuffs.  
  
"They'll keep saying 'grassy knoll', too, which is a terrible phrase. I have no idea why that one stuck."  
  
Nothing.  
  
He says, "I shot a president once. Didn't mean to, but I did. Got set up. And I did worse than that. Fought in a war, I couldn't tell anyone. Took down two worlds. I really did, no kidding. I thought I was my own man, a free agent, just helping out. Then, well. Things happened. They always do."  
  
He says, "The tides of history are against us, Lee."  
  
He says, "It wasn't our fault."  
  
He says, "I'm sorry."


End file.
